Addley Walker is a comics and pattern maker from Los Angeles, CA. He joined us in Pittsburgh for a Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency in June 2017 (read about his experience HERE). While he was visiting, we realized that Addley was plugged into a different corner of the comics making community, and seeing work that we weren’t familiar with. His enthusiasm was catching, so we asked him to share with us some of the comics makers and artists that he follows and enjoys. Below is the “list” he sent. – Sally

By far the best project of the already impressive body of work of queer webcomics wizard Cate Wurtz, Crow Cillers is an intense story about cute animal critters stuck in an oppressive world of cults and body horror. Presented in a faux-television manner where characters’ dialogue appears as closed captioning, stories change channels into others, and “episodes” in an arc are collected into season “box sets” (it, and individual episodes available monthly via her Patreon, are html documents that bring up navigable menus), Wurtz presents us casual talking sitcom characters forced to deal with increasingly violent situations while weaving in a metanarrative dealing with issues such as the absurd and often dark environment of the internet itself. Wurtz’s aesthetic and thematic odes to DeviantArt and Hot Topic not only serves as a coherent vehicle for her message, but asks the reader to re-evaluate their relationship with not only the corporate rebellion of Korn (most evident in her chopped ‘n screwed electronic music that is the suggested series soundtrack) and Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic with GUNS), but the earnest reaction to these institutions by the fringes of internet art and fetish communities. Download the pilot and first season free on her website. Hail Gay Satan.

There were some very good stories in Kramer’s 9, but Adam Buttrick’s entry really made the book for me. Adam’s making very peculiar and powerful work, with a literary influence that, while escaping my personal understanding, draws me deeper into the situations and characters that feel so familiar after a lifetime of cartoons and video games. His incredibly busy pages have a surprisingly minimal economy of shapes, making everything clear in the mess of action that make up his world. Angel of a Rope is another excellent entry into the ouvre of someone who I find to be one of the most exciting cartoonists working today.

I’m generally very wary of artists who foster a branded presentation of their work, and Elevator Teeth definitely has that aspect. Scrolling on their website I watch art posts transform into shirts, a part of an image becomes a button or patch, an illustration becomes a record cover which becomes an object that gets waggled on a talk show. It helps that the work is rendered in such a clean and minimal style, which makes it very susceptible to duplication and modification. As such, words and images will come up again, re-arranged and colored differently. This shifting quality of Elevator Teeth’s work is part of it’s magic, though, and looking at one image after the other becomes very dreamlike and hypnotic. The objects in these images hold an internal charge and react in strange and interesting ways to new compositions. The zine Now Nowhere, which came out early last year, is a great example. With work originally presented as one pagers that work very well as statements by themselves, Elevator Teeth puts them together to reveal that side-by-side they form a coherent story that lasts 28 pages. Slick and fashionable as it looks, Elevator Teeth’s work is fundamentally about consciousness, and shows the way in which digital techniques can lend themselves to powerful forms of truth seeking.

Omnipresent anthology contributor Leon Sadler and fellow fine art nerd Yannick Val Gesto are a dynamic duo whose collaborations I wish I knew more about. I do not know how I found this fabulous book in the first place, probably because I am great. Presenting itself as a gentle self help manual, Warrior Pose (which was consigned along with a video of the same name) might not be comics, but those literate to the form should have an entry into some joyful collages of anime, fanart, chan imagery, and other serene weirdness, along with drawings by both. Val Gesto’s ((Gesto?)) quest in particular, revealing the beauty of internet ugliness, I find incredibly compelling, much like Cate Wurtz. Leon Sadler is pretty cool, too.

This entry is a funeral for the self experience that I discovered will be forever unrealized by me not owning this zine of colorful haniwa frolics. Mushbuh is someone who initially caught me with their lively Illustrator art and comics, as well as a demo for their N64 love letter Burrito Galaxy. While Mushbuh seems to be on a more automatic, almost anti-aesthetic track today, evidence is still there of the tightly geometric, bouncy cartoon art I see still around in works of artists such as George Wysesol. Please contact me if you have evidence of rare sightings of these boys…

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Sally is a cartoonist, educator, and journalist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She makes comics about Pittsburgh and bird watching, and co-writes the "Suzy and Cecil" daily strip (with Gabriella Tito). She facilitates the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency, is a managing editor of the CW Daily News, and runs the CW Roller Derby "of the mind" League. She is focused on documenting the current and historic place of women in the comics industry, is working to build the Women's Comics Library, and is developing a comics curriculum by and for girls.